been recruited into the Roman army, some of their members settling peacefully
within the imperial borders. The Burgundian experience was similar.
The Romans called all these peoples “barbarians.” They called some of them
“Germani”—Germans—because they materialized from beyond the Rhine, in the
region that the Romans called Germania. Historians today tend to differentiate these
peoples linguistically: “Germanic peoples” are those who spoke Germanic languages.
Whatever name we give them (they certainly had no collective name for themselves),
these peoples were, by the fourth century, long used to a settled existence.
Archaeologists have found evidence in northern Europe of hamlets built and
continuously inhabited for centuries by Germanic groups before any entered the
Empire. A settlement near Wijster, near the North Sea (today in the Netherlands), is a
good example of one such community. Inhabited largely between c.150 and c.400, it
consisted of well over fifty large rectangular wooden houses—these were partitioned
so that they could be shared by humans and animals—and many smaller out-
buildings, some of which were used as barns or workrooms, others as dwellings.
Palisades—fences made of wooden stakes—enclosed each of these complexes. The
people who lived at Wijster cultivated grains and raised cattle. They also raised
horses, as we know from the fact that they frequently buried their horses in carefully
dug rectangular pits. Some were craftsmen, like the carpenters who built the houses,
the ironworkers who made the tools, and the cobbler who made a shoe found on the
site. Some were craftswomen, like the spinners and weavers who used the spindle-
whorls and loom-weights that were found there.
The disparate sizes of its houses suggest that the community at Wijster was
hardly egalitarian. The cemetery there made the same point, since, while most of the
graves contained no goods at all, a very few were richly furnished with weapons,
necklaces, and jewelry. It seems that the wealthy few also had access to Roman
products: archaeologists have unearthed a couple of Roman coins, bits of Roman
glass, and numerous fragments of provincial Roman pottery. But even the rich at
Wijster were probably not very powerful: it is very likely that here, as elsewhere in
the Germanic world, kings leading military retinues lorded it over the community,
commanding labor services and a percentage of its agricultural production.
How did the better-off inhabitants of Wijster get their Roman dinnerware? They
probably produced surplus enough to trade for other goods. All along the empire’s
border, Germanic traders bartered with Roman provincials. No physical trait
distinguished buyers from sellers. But barbarians and Romans had numerous ethnic
differences—differences created by preferences and customs surrounding food,
